Best Backup Plugins for WordPress in 2019

If you own or manage a website with lots of content, what is the biggest nightmare that can happen to it?

Losing all those hardwork and the website getting vanished.

However, you can almost avoid such a disaster if you have a habit of taking regular backups. Backup is a record of your whole website including its content. With that, you can quickly restore the site to the most recent version even if something unfortunate happens.

When you use WordPress as your content management system, taking backups is quite easy with plugins. In today’s post, let us look at some of the best backup plugins for WordPress.

What’s in a backup?

Before that, you must also be aware of the four main constituents of a WordPress backup.

Database: WordPress uses MySQL database to store contents like posts, pages, site settings, and other data. So, the database is the most important component of any backup. Without it, you won’t be able to restore your site.

Website Files: A backup will not be complete without the necessary files. Remember that there are plugins that take only the database. In this article, we only look at the plugins that give full backups.

Media Uploads: Media include photos, images, PDFs and other things that you upload to your site. If you try to restore a database without the associated media, all the links to media will appear broken.

Plugins: Since plugins add extra functionalities, without it, the site may break after restoring. However, if you have a list of plugins you had previously on your site, you can re-install all those one by one. But what is the need for such a hassle when you can easily include plugins in your backup.

Themes: Lastly, a theme determines the design and layout of your site. So you should backup it as well.

Features to look for in a backup Plugin

These are the top things I look for in a backup plugin:

Scheduled or automatic backups

Cloud-based storage

Ability to take full or partial backups

Incremental or real-time backups

Ability to restore

Website Migration & cloning

Best WordPress Backup Plugins

Now let us look into the list. I have arranged the list based on my personal preference. However, each plugin differs from others in terms of features and ease of use. So, choose one based on your specific requirements.

1. UpdraftPlus

UpdraftPlus is probably the best option available for backing up WordPress without spending money. I have used it on my own sites and it worked great. For me, the option to store it to Google Drive or DigitalOcean Spaces is the top reason to choose UpdraftPlus. Many other plugins offer this for premium only.

Apart from Google Drive and Spaces, the free version of UpdraftPlus allows you to choose Dropbox, Amazon S3 or any other S3-compatible locations for remote storage.

UpdraftPlus Premium

Apart from the much powerful free version, UpdraftPlus comes with three tiers of pro versions. The price starts at $70 for two sites. In addition to these, you can also buy individual features as add-ons which cost much less.

2. Backup Guard

BackUpGuard is another popular website backup and restoration solution who offer a cloud-based solution as well as a stand-alone plugin.

Unlike Updraft, BackUpGuard offers site migration between domains or hosts in its free version. So if you are looking for that feature, this might be the plugin you need. It has multi-site support too.

On the other hand, free BackUpGuard allows you to store backups remotely on Dropbox only. If you want the ability to upload to Google Drive, S3 or others, you have to buy a premium license.

BackUpGuard Overview

Free plugin

Premium Pricing

Plugin: $35.95 – $79.95
Cloud: $9.95 – $99.95/mo

Plugin Installations

70k+

Rating

4.54/5

Features

Scheduling

Remote Storage

Free – Dropbox

Pro only – SFTP, Google Drive
Amazon S3, OneDrive

Restore

Migration

Partial Backups

Incremental Backups

Available in CloudNot in plugin

BackUpGuard Premium

The price of the premium plugin is around $36 for five websites, which is almost half the price of UpdraftPlus.

Cloud-based Backup for any CMS or Website

In addition to the plugin, they also have a cloud service which can backup any type of website, be it WordPress or not. The service connects to your website via FTP (for files) and MySQL (for the database). The incremental backup feature is available only in the cloud solution, not in the plugin.

3. BackWPup

At first look, the dashboard of BackWPup is not that intuitive as that of the other plugins. You have to set Jobs for each type of backup (full, partial, or database) you want to take. After that, you can run these jobs manually or at scheduled intervals.

However, the free plugin does not include restoration feature. You have to do that manually. That can be a deal-breaker if you are not a technically-inclined person.

BackWPup Overview

Free plugin

Premium Pricing

$69 – $349

Plugin Installations

600k+

Rating

4.43/5

Features

Scheduling

Remote Storage

Free – FTP, Dropbox, S3, Azure, Rackspace

Pro only – Google Drive, Amazon Glacier

Restore

Premium feature

Migration

Partial Backups

Incremental Backups

BackWPup Premium

The premium gives one-click restores along with a variety of other features like:

4. WP Time Capsule

WP Time Capsule is a premium-only plugin. While all the other plugins in this list focus on taking full-site backups, this plugin emphasizes the advantages of incremental and real-time backups over traditional backups.

Suppose your site is around 1GB in size when you first take a full backup. You update your site daily by adding images and content. So it keeps growing day by day.

If you do backups daily, within one month, your archive will be more than 30GB. So you can run out of space quickly. That’s why most plugins allow you to set the number of backups you want to retent. The disadvantage is that you don’t have much restore points in case you want to switch the site to a previous state.

In contrast to this, real-time and incremental backup solutions like WP Time Capsule take a snapshot of the full site only once. From there, it will store only the changes. For example, if you upload an image, the plugin saves just that into the archive. This allows you to keep a much longer backup archive without running out of space.

WP Time Capsule Overview

Free plugin

Premium Pricing

$49 – $199

Scheduling

Remote Storage

FTP, Dropbox, S3, Google Drive, Wasabi

Restore

Upto 365 days of backup archive

Migration

One-click staging available

Incremental Backups

Currently, WP Time Capsule allows you to store backups on Dropbox, S3, Google Drive, and Wasabi.

6. Duplicator

Duplicator is a complete WordPress cloning and migration tool with over 1 million active installations. It is often the best choice when you want to move a site from one host to another or from one domain to another.

A migration plugin inevitably needs to take backups too. So, if you use Duplicator, you don’t need to look for another plugin when you want to move your site.

While backing up, Duplicator creates two files – an installer and a zipped package. The installer helps to restore the site on the current location or somewhere else. The package contains your complete website. Again like WPBackItUp, the plugin needs zip module active on your host. If that is not possible, it offers DupArchive compression also.

To restore or migrate, upload both the installer and packages using FTP or CPanel to the directory where you want to install your site. Then run the installer.php file from a browser (eg., mysite.com/installer.php).

Duplicator Overview

Free plugin

Premium Pricing

$59 onwards

Scheduling

Premium

Remote Storage

Free – None
Pro – S3, Dropbox, Google Drive,OneDrive, SFTP

Migration/Restore

Incremental Backups

On some budget hosts, the backup may fail due to timeout settings on the server. So I do not recommend using free Duplicator with medium or large sites on cheap shared hosts. However, remember that this can happen with any backup or migration plugin when trying to create big archive files. So, the problem is not specific to Duplicator.

Duplicator Pro

Since the free version does not have many features, you will have to buy Duplicator Pro to schedule backups and save to remote cloud storage.

In addition to these, the Pro version also supports multi-threading, which may ease the process of migrating large websites and databases.

7. BlogVault

BlogVault is very much similar to WP Time Capsule as it takes incremental backups instead of creating full-site archives. So, you can be almost sure that failures won’t occur as in the case of Duplicator.

With this plugin, your site is in sync with BlogVault’s servers. On the flip side, you cannot select other cloud services like Dropbox for syncing. So you have to trust them with your backups.

BlogVault Overview

Free plugin

Premium Pricing

$89 onwards

Scheduling

Remote Storage

BlogVault storage

Restore

90 or 365 days

Migration

Incremental Backups

Starting from $89/mo, the price is a bit on the expensive edge. The also gives monthly plans. Since they offer a free trial, you can try and make sure it is the right choice before buying.

The Basic and Plus plans give 90 days of backup archive while the high-end Advanced plan gives 365-day archive with real-time syncing.

8. VaultPress

ValutPress is a part of JetPack, created by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.

So, in order to use VaultPress, you have to buy a JetPack subscription. That comes as an advantage and a disadvantage. If you currently use JetPack, you might find this useful. On the other hand, if you don’t want to use JetPack, you can’t buy VaultPress alone. According to this support thread, they also plan to integrate VaultPress completely into JetPack and deprecate the standalone feature.

VaultPress Overview

Free plugin

Premium Pricing

$39 onwards

Scheduling

Remote Storage

VaultPress storage

Restore

30 days to unlimites

Migration

Incremental Backups

Just like BlogVault and WP Time Capsule, VaultPress is also a premium-only plugin which takes incremental backups. The price starts at $39/year for the Personal license. It includes scheduling daily backups.

JetPack Business starts at $99/year and includes malware scanning and protection.

To back up in real-time, you have to go for the highest plan which also offers unlimited days of backup archive.

9. BackupBuddy

BackupBuddy is a premium offering from Ithemes, the creators of the popular Ithemes Security Plugin.

The plugin offers two types of backups:

Traditional – normal full-site snapshots from your server.

Stash Live – real-time syncing without stressing your server.

With their Stash Live feature, you can take automatic real-time backups and sync with BackupBuddy Stash storage. Each purchase comes with free 1GB of storage, which may not be sufficient for large blogs. Also, you cannot use other cloud storage providers to sync with Stash Live. This is a bit limiting in my opinion. On top of that, if you want more storage, you have to buy additional storage space from Ithemes.

10. ManageWP

ManageWP is not really a backup plugin. Instead, it is a great solution to manage multiple WordPress websites from a single dashboard. It offers one-click plugin and theme updates across all of your connected sites.

In fact, it works off-site without the need to install a plugin. You just have to connect your site with their service by giving the credentials. If you are not sure about giving out your site password and username, you can install ManageWP’s Worker plugin, which in turn generate a unique connection key.

I have been using it for a while to manage my own sites. The experience is smooth so far.

All the basic features are free for any number of sites, which includes backups also. The highlights are:

Free monthly backups

Remote/off-site storage on S3 for 90 days, owned by ManageWP

Easy restoration and cloning

If you want daily or more frequent backups, you can buy the premium backup feature for $2 per month for one website. Still, it is very much affordable. I have only tried the free backup feature, which is sufficient for sites that are not updated frequently.

Conclusion

So far, we have discussed some of the top plugins available in the WordPress ecosystem to securely backup your site. Still, if you are confused to choose one, here are my three picks.

UpdraftPlus – feature-rich free version & great premium plans

WP Time Capsule – for incremental backups

ManageWP – for multiple sites

If you ask me to select the best free backup plugin, it is UpdraftPlus. Why? Because it has the most options for free. Moreover, the plugin has worked without any glitch on several less powerful shared hosts like Godaddy and Bluehost.

For frequent incremental backups that do not stress your server, WP Time Capsule offers the best value for money.

And finally, for managing tens of sites, ManageWP backups comes handy without relying on other plugins.

Coming back to you, if you could not find your favorite plugin in the list, feel free to mention it in the comments. I’ll take a look at it also.